Sunday, November 23, 2014

Sucks To Be Poor

I was not too pleased to read about Microsoft replacing security guards with robots. They probably spent a princely sum on the robots, all for the sake of giving some poor guys making $15 an hour the pink slip.

At least the idle aristocrats of Downton Abbey had enough of a conscience to employ the lower classes and think about their welfare. There is something to be said for sharing the wealth and bringing employment to a community, and yes, Microsoft does "owe" the community in which it does business.

It has always sucked to be poor, perhaps more so before the advent of Obamacare, but in the future, all bets are off. Computers and robots keep getting smarter, whereas our pace of evolution is at a standstill according to most authorities. It's not our fault that we can't replace the "chip" inside our brains with a newer and faster "chip". Biological science has not yet advanced to the stage where we can design our offspring or ourselves.

I think that as more people become unemployed and unemployable due to the replacement of humans with computers, there will be a larger group of hungry, poor, discontented people, eager for any type of change, including war. Of course nothing will be done to stop global warming, and the coming scarcity of resources such as drinking water, food and electricity will be a huge pressure upon the lower classes.

 The writing on the wall is evident in the U.S. Our vast army of law enforcement officers, already unprecedented in its numbers and resources, will expand and transform, under Republican leadership and guidance, into a kind of Schutzstaffel, eliminating "undesirables," that is, the lower class, and protecting the property of the rich, more or less as it does now. The rich today murder and go free, whereas the poor are jailed and occasionally killed for the slightest infraction. Ferguson could be a harbinger of things to come. Perhaps in the final analysis, it is a good thing that the U.S. has such liberal gun laws, because the Schutzstaffel of the future will not hold all the cards.

I really hope that sanity prevails. I also hope that our scientists develop a way to improve the human animal. Throughout history, science has proven more of a beneficial influence on the human condition and especially on the lower classes than any politicians. Just learning how to prevent the spread of common diseases by washing hands on a regular basis was a huge step forward in medical science and of greater value than anything any politician ever did. The nurses and doctors that insisted upon hand-washing were great heroes of civilization.

I hope that the right-wingers that America elected into office don't drag the country down into war, famine, disease and misery. Just because there is something that makes people happy and more productive does not mean that you have to destroy it. Republicans want to end Obamacare, immigration liberalization and even the minimum wage, and they don't seem to care about Social Security either. What is so bad about paying a worker $11 an hour instead of $7.25 an hour? It seems to me that right-wingers want to pull the wings off butterflies just for the sake of doing it. And then there are some people that would rather pay $1 million for a damn robot than $30,000 a year for a human being to work a job. What is the human supposed to do? Join Islamic jihad?

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